About Arnold

A Filipino tech guy who reluctantly pursued entrepreneurship and now leads TeamSparrow, a team of web developers, designers and marketers based in Mandaluyong City, Philippines. A husband, father and a follower of Jesus.

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Why we’re sticking it out with Kohana (PHP) and not jumping ship to Ruby on Rails

I have to admit it — I have a "Ruby on Rails" envy. Ruby on Rails is like PHP 10 years ago. PHP was hot and the talk of the town back then. Now, every cool dudes I know are either iPhone developers or Ruby on Rails geeks. Ruby on Rails looked very sexy. Red hot sexy. Girl-in-2-piece-in-a-wine-commercial sexy. And us PHP guys? We looked old, slow, messy and uncool. I don't know if it's just bad press, but that's how they describe us these days.

We've made a living out of PHP for years. I've started a company that revolves around PHP. We've developed hundreds of websites in PHP.

And I'd say, we're sticking it out with PHP — at least in the next few years. Here's why.

1. It's a business move. We're basically an outsource consultant. While we're moving slowly to building our own products, we rely on clients paying our bills. Most clients still prefer PHP and we have to admit it, according to statistics 70% of websites are done in PHP. We'd rather just do the job than explain to the client why Ruby on Rails is hotter than PHP.

2. Kohana (PHP framework) IS our Ruby on Rails. They say that RoR makes you code faster, easier. But honestly, it's an overstatement if we will keep it against PHP. There's been a lot of frameworks for PHP these days. We're currently using Kohana 3 and so far we're loving it. It makes our job easy, simple and we've able to make web applications for clients for days for others that is coded in months using plain PHP. Writing a Ruby on Rails simple blog in 15 mins? I can write a Kohana blog in 5 mins :D Kidding aside, really, if fast coding is the argument, we don't have any problems with Kohana. It's flexible, too! Wants to see your database queries or use ORM to reduce your RoR envy? You choose. It comes with HMVC. Not just MVC… that's HMVC. How about another letter in front to make it sound sexier than RoR, eh!. ;)

Don't get me wrong. Given a free time, I'd like to see RoR in action in the future. And I still do envy the RoR dudes. Seriously. You're all cool and sexy. You're the future of the web. But hey, Kohana does the job, and does it right, too. So we'll stick with our good old mama for now.